Corinne Maier is an economist, psychoanalyst and essayist. She has written 15 books, including Bonjour Paresse (Hello Laziness, 2004) and No Kid (2007). She recently published #MeFirst! Manifeste pour un Egoïsme au Féminin (#MeFirst! Manifesto for Female Selfishness, L'Observatoire, 160 pages, €18).
I wrote this book to denounce a great injustice: unlike men, women don't have the right to be selfish. As a child, when my cousin used to snatch my toys, everyone would say, "He's a real little boy!" But when I stole his things, no one would say, "She's a real girl!" For men, selfishness is very much tolerated, even rewarded. A man who doesn't get up at night to look after the baby doesn't have time to shop for groceries because he gets home late from work, needs to play sports during the weekend to unwind... all this is considered normal. On the flip side, a woman who forgets when she's supposed to pick up her child from school because she's having a drink with her friends is seen as a bad mother. She's betraying her protective nature – an outrage!
Figures show that the imbalance persists and that the mental load continues to be unevenly distributed. Women perform 75% of the world's unpaid care work. On average, they take care of children four times as much and domestic chores three times as much. Their lives are still far more limited than those of men. Looking after others takes up their time and energy while limiting their perspectives. Conversely, men do what they feel like doing, whether they have children or not.
Just do less. It may not sound like much but that's where real change begins. It's time for women to assert their right to selfishness. They must refuse to put their careers after those of their partners to try to be like "super-mothers" invested 100% in their children's welfare, to look after their elderly parents when the men in the family do it ten times less... In short, they must kill the "angel of the house" once and for all, that little inner voice inherited from previous centuries which, according to [the feminist British author] Virginia Woolf, commands women to be devoted servants to domestic life.
I'm not talking about the kind of selfishness that is about navel gazing and living in isolation. I'm defending a liberating form of selfishness predicated on self-responsibility which enables people to live with others without suffocating them since we recognize their fundamental right to dedicate themselves to their needs. When women refuse to accept the role others wrote for them, the feminist revolution will truly be underway. As Benoîte Groult put it in her suggestively-titled book Mon Evasion [My Escape, Grasset, 2008], to be selfish is to protect your health!
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